Well, that was an adventure.

I went into the jam knowing there was a good chance I wouldn't have as much time as I wanted to work on my game because of other things going on, but it was so much worse than I thought. I think I put about maybe four good days worth of work in across the whole two weeks, and there were at least five or six days where I didn't even get to open up Godot at all. I barely had a chance to look at the jam Discord, and for some reason all my images would break when I tried to post them on here. It was a real mess, and I almost bailed entirely.

As you might guess, I hacked out tons of what I had planned for the game to make the deadline (and still submitted ten minutes before deadline), including anything but the horrible placeholder art I made to get the mechanics working. Yikes. I do like the above title screen, and I think the monsters actually look pretty decent. The player animations aren't bad, but the actual sprite is basically a blank slate. Also I apologize if the sunlight collectibles enemies drop make anyone else want butterscotch candy, because that's what they've been doing to me.

So, of my plans, outlined in my devlog (with all of two whole posts in it, oh boy), all I ended up with was movement, one melee attack, a dodge move, player health and damage that can be upgraded, one enemy, the sunlight pickups that act as currency, and a title screen. There's music, but I did it in like five minutes, so it's...not great. Though the title screen tune is pretty nice in a minimalist way. I did at least manage to incorporate the roguelike elements I wanted, with persistent upgrades you can make between runs, though "runs" is maybe too generous of a term.

All that said, I'm really glad I joined the jam, and really glad I stuck it out and submitted something, even if it's pretty janky and just so, so ugly lol. It let me give myself permission to really take some time to dig into Godot, and I absolutely love it. I'm still a novice, but by the end I was mostly able to figure out problems on my own without too much reliance on the internet. The in-editor documentation is so slick and easy to check it's a huge help. I definitely think I'll be making the jump from Unity, which honestly I haven't even run in months.

I still want to add all the things I pictured for the game, especially some actual artwork and audio, but I was sure I'd do that with my last jam game and never picked it up again, so we'll see. I hope I come back to it, because I think it could be something pretty cool with more than four days of work. If you give it a try, thanks!